Music, photo op with instant print, art, free food and a mini-ball. Loud and fun, that is how the social campaign PrEP4Teens launched to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS prevention.
Teens, young adults, their parents and local residents gathered to celebrate the launch of the social campaign and unveiling of a new mural in mid-November at West Side’s Taskforce Prevention and Community Services, campaigns main partner.
The highlight of the evening was the reveal of that two-sided mural by David Gauna, Chicago-based muralist, on the windows of Taskforce’s building.
“It’s a lot easier to digest an image than it is an essay and a lot more eye-catching, this project creates cool opportunities for artists to get involved in the process of educating along with scientists.” said Milan Leo Martinez, an 18-year-old freshman art media and design major at DePaul University.
Martinez came to the event with his boyfriend of over two years, Sean Narducy, a 19-year-old child care worker.
Martinez is also a youth leader with the PrEP4Teens campaign who also does its illustrations and content creation. He designed the stickers for the campaign with messages like “My body is beautiful” and “Hi, I’m empowered by my freedom.”
“[PrEP4Teens] program gave me the information toolboxes that weren’t provided in my sexual health classes at my old high school,” Martinez said.
The campaign, a partnership between Taskforce and Northwestern University, also helped open up a conversation between Sky, fifth-grade student, and their parents.
“It’s not a hard conversation to have if it’s not the first conversation you’re having about it,” said Alex Plotsky, Sky’s dad.
Sky has been doing vogue dancing for the past couple of months and came to the event to participate in their first ball competition. They think that although their school does discuss queer sexual education, it is not always correct or full information.
“I didn’t really know that much about [PrEP],” Plotsky said.
PrEP is a generic term that stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis. It includes taking a pill or an injection to prevent HIV-negative people from contracting the virus. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2018.
The same year, Kathryn Macapagal, PhD Associate Professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University did her own research on PrEP awareness. She discovered that 45.2% of LGBTQ+ teens were not aware of PrEP and only 2.5% of those who did hear about it used it. It also showed that 56.1% did not know how they could access it.
“Our goal is to meet teens and young people where they are in the ways that they feel most comfortable to draw them in and make them interested in health-related information,” Macapagal said.
Although campaigns for PrEP existed by that time, they were focused only on adults. That is why Macapagal reached out to Jim Pickett to create a new social marketing campaign that targets teens and young adults to bridge the gap in HIV safety.
Picket is no stranger to social marketing campaigns — he was the leader of PrEP4Love that launched 2016 and targeted adults. The campaign was successful, generating 40,913,560 unique views across different social platforms, according to reports.
Although Pickett called PrEP4Teens a child of his PrEP4Love, he said it is different. The campaign was created in collaboration with the youth. They participated in the creation of the aesthetic of the campaign, blog creation, stickers and mural design.
“PrEP is available to young people, but they’re not taking it up, they don’t know about it,” Picket said.
“There’s a lot of barriers to taking PrEP and knowing about PrEP. There hasn’t been any real efforts focused around teens and PrEP.”
The campaign plans three more murals in the future but do not yet have a place and date finalized.
